Last night, buoyed with a tub of vanilla ice cream and post-ride fuzzies, I finally got around to watching the last, movie-length episode of the gloriously weird Sense8. Yes, I cried.

I stuck around for the credits, and post all of that deep emotion, saw the logo for Venus Castina Productions, the company of Lana Wachowski and her wife, Karin Winslow, and thought, “I know that arse. I’d recognise that arse anywhere. I saw that arse in the Louvre.” I didn’t photograph her from that side though, but she was on my ticket when I visited, and I spent a long time with her, five hours into my nine-hours of getting done by the Louvre. Hermaphrodite endormi, 2nd century Rome with the bedding done in the 17th century when the fashion was to go all Baroque on Classic sculpture.

Mixing the NGV’s Triennial and its own collection together as I was decidedly zombie on the day (Paea saw me and laughed), and sometimes not sure where one or the other began or stopped, and saving all the old cruft for a separate post.

Richard Mosse I confused with Trevor Paglen, whose Limit Telephotography and The Black Sites work has been turning up in my reading for over a decade. Mosse is kind of a successor, or working similarly, pushing photographic technology and making deeply political art. Louisa Bufardeci also, though using manual labour to again create something on first view beautiful and aesthetic, which is contextualised into a evidence of and memorial for refugees whose boats sunk at sea off the coast of Australia. Both these works sit uneasily inside Fortress Australia and within the NGV, as Mosse’s second work (which you have to pass through to reach Incoming) describes: the NGV’s former use of Wilson’s security, to whom the government outsourced illegal detention centre policing. (The NGV ended its contract with Wilson’s after artists’ protests, organised by Gabrielle de Vietri and others, though the relationship between arts institutions like the NGV, policing and generations of human rights violations remains largely untouched.)

Onto something slightly more cheerful, or at least I could not wipe the smile off my face watching Adel Abidin’sCover Up! where Marilyn Monroe’s iconic subway scene in The Seven Year Itch is replaced by an Arab man wearing a Kandura (Dishdasha, Thawb) giving me the cheekiest eye as he tries (not very hard) to prevent a flash of leg.

Next to that is Faig Ahmed, with a 21st century Azerbaijani carpet, digitally bleeding and glitching. Hal reminds me of the Afghan War Rugs, cultural memory lossy compression like a jpg, copied and recopied with no line of context to an original, regional signifiers and techniques that say authentic and traditional unfolded as repeating geometric shapes of aircraft carriers, World Trade Centre towers, text like USA and Pepsi, blocks of iconography decoupled from meaning, becoming pattern again.

Timo Nasseri, Epistrophy, op-art cut into the wall like the mid-20th century works of Adolf Luther I saw in Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal. Possibly a new profile photo coming out of that, but not thinking much of it until I looked at more of his work and saw the thread of Islamic / Islamicate architecture and mathematics in it. Good choice for a profile photo, then.

Jumping to the last artist, Nusra Latif Qureshi. She used to come into the VCA Student Union when we were both students. I always loved her art, miniatures in the South Asian tradition (which has connections to mediæval European illuminations, art flowing along the lines of trade as much as trade and commerce), and I was really happy to see her work in the NGV. Again, political, the colonial history of Europe in the unbroken history of Asia-Pacific.

I had thoughts, weaving through the Triennial and the NGV’s permanent collection in my spent, post-festival state. Thoughts. Many. I had. Like, the art that can touch me is always political, because art is inseparable from political, unless the artist has the luxury to be insulated from having political’s gaze turn onto them, so they get to play with ideas and technology and pretend there are no consequences, no urgency, no struggle; they get to live without the violence of history. I see myself in art that is political, even though it is seldom specifically ‘about’ me. I see also a difference between the superficially political, diversity as aesthetic, and art by artists whose lives, by their very existence, is political. I saw the strength of the NGV when it celebrates, represents, amplifies Asia-Pacific and Indigenous artists. This is when it makes sense, not when it assembles an incoherent, contextless junk box of ‘European’ art, manufacturing a phantasmic history of Australia, like Australia was ever located just off the coast of England, or when it divides that into Art and anything pre-Invasion Asia-Pacific into Ethnography. I didn’t see the entirety of the Triennial or the NGV, it’s an awkwardly designed interior space, easy to miss cul-de-sac turn-offs that open to entire wings, more time walking to and from and between than through art. It struggles between competing imperatives, like that of its European fantasy, or oddly misplaced exhibitions that owe more to consular trade and advertising than art and artists. But, see the Triennial? Yes, if you’re in Naarm. There’s good stuff there (heaps I didn’t see, let alone photograph).

One of my favourite works in the NGV Triennial — and in the gallery altogether. Calm, meditative destruction in infra-red black and white in a cavernous, beanbag-filled auditorium. Post-FOLA decompression and collapse, bumping into Paea — again, so many times — and barely assembling a conversation in my shuffling exhaustion. I had a thought watching Richard Mosse’s Incoming that art works for me only when it’s political, and all art is inherently political, existing as it does apart or outside of language (be it written or spoken). When I look at European mediæval art, I see vast political, theological, philosophical arguments being waged in materiality; the same for religious works in other regions I am familiar with enough to make basic statements on. This is what, for me anyway, makes art that purports to not be political so weak, like Iris Van Herpen’s fashion design, pushing material technology in beautiful ways, yet strangely inert in political’s absence. You’re only playing if you’re not political.

I thought it was called a Sun Dog. Similar, but different. It’s a Glory. Last time I saw a glory was flying into London to work with Onyx on Take This, For It Is My body, early morning end-October last year. That time, the plane raced along at its centre, as a shadow on the ground.

It’s an early morning thing, and cold morning one. This time I wasn’t sure it was real or just my eyes diffracting the scratched plastic and glass of the window. It came and went for some minutes, waning and waxing then departing as we altered course. It wasn’t very pronounced, but still, sun glory over the Baltic, flying from Helsinki to Berlin on the last leg of my first return to Naarm / Melbourne in a decade.

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Currently in: Berlin

supernaut is Frances d’Ath. She has blogged here since 2004. You can find her performances and choreography at francesdath.info. Her design work is at francesdath.name. Frances would like to remind you that I am not my blog (though she likes WordPress very much).